The proposed research is a study of the processing of criminal defendants through five decision points in the criminal justice system (bail, prosecution, plea bargaining, sentence severity, and length of prison sentence). Rather than testing the explanatory power of consensus, labelling, or conflict theories, an organizational perspective is articulated to guide our analyses of the longitudinal experience of defendants as they pass from arrest to disposition in the federal courts of ten major American cities. In addition to multivariate analysis of quantitative data collected for 14,000 defendants, it is proposed that supplementary and complementary qualitative data be collected. The qualitative data will be used to generate hypotheses, and to help interpret how the contextual effects that characterize the organizational structure of decision making affect those processes. The fact that all defendants are arrested and charged with violations of federal statutes allows a unique opportunity to control for variation in statutory law, while analyzing regional, demographic and procedural variations among jurisdictions. Also unique to these data is the wide variation in the socioeconomic status of defendants which results from the large scale federal responsibility for the prosecution of "white collar crimes". The strategy of data analysis we outline will allow us to look both at the relationship between social class and criminal sanctions and related but separable organizational patterns in the manifestation of discretion in criminal justice decision making. Finally, the significance of the proposed research for sociological theory, criminology, and social policy is discussed with particular attention to the emergence of an empirically based theory of decision making, and the relevance of such to pending legislation for reforming the criminal justice system.